Wait a minute (or weight a lifetime)

As a child I was skinny, as a teenager I was skinny, when I first got married in 1968 I was a size 8.
By the time I was 21 I had developed what are now called "good child bearing hips", but I still had a 22" waist and virtually no boobs to speak of (in those days my first husband used to call me Sonny Jim because of my flat chest!) I had my first child at age 22 and second at age 27, and as in those days a lot of things that we have machines to do these days we had then to do by hand, I managed to stay relatively slim. I've always been fairly active anyway, enjoying gardening, walking etc. Towards the end of my first marriage I suppose I was possibly carrying a bit of extra weight around my hips and my husband then referred to me as "The fat cow".
By the time I was 40 I had walked away from my first marriage and was into my second. Two more pregnancies in quick succession left me rather overweight, and as my second marriage was a) happy and b) comfortable I didn't really worry much about my weight in the early years. I was still fairly active, still gardening and walking everywhere with the double buggy.
But my eating habits became erratic and I started to drink a bit to much, only social drinking, maybe a couple of bottles of wine between us over the weekend and a couple of lagers each evening to wind down when the kids were asleep. And my sweet tooth took over. I didn't put on huge amounts of weight, its just been a steady increase year on year.
My lovely OH has recently retired so instead of sitting at a computer all day he is now doing all sorts of jobs around the house and garden and he is losing weight. I have had a stiff and painful back all winter and I have most definitely slowed down a lot, so I am still gaining and I suddenly find myself, at age 63 weighing 75 kilos (thats just over 11.5 stone, and almost as much as him!!!), not yet obese, but heading in that direction and certainly way over what I should weigh.
We are currently in a sort of limbo-land, our house is on the market, so I intend to use this limbo time to become more active in the dietary sense, I shall lose some of this extra blubber that has attached itself to my once slender frame, with the help of the Slinky Slimmers group I have joined on Facebook, and the support of Momentum, a group of mums trying to lose weight (I still qualify even though my eldest is 40 and my youngest nearly 21, I'm a mum trying to regain my pre-baby body - if somewhat belatedly!).